From Straw to Steel

I am facing the daunting task of setting up three daughters for successful distance learning. I keep reminding myself that there is no playbook for parenting during a pandemic. This helps assuage the guilt I feel for engaging in petty acts of bribery. We have resorted to cajoling our kids into engaging with Zoom lessons for interminable hours by adopting a range of lovable furry animals. This inducement elicited a fierce backseat debate between my two youngest.

“Lolli, what do you want, a cat or a dog?” asked Micah.

“I think cats are cuddlier, so I’d say a cat,” replied Lolli.

“You’re such a dog hater!” retorted Micah.

From the driver’s seat, I couldn’t help but interject and point out to Micah that she had just used a straw man argument against Lolli. Neither saw the relevance of The Wizard of Oz in their dispute.

Straw man arguments riddle the invective of social media. Here’s one I just picked off Facebook.

Poster 1: I believe that building a wall on the border will stem the tide of illegal immigration.

Poster 2: Only a racist would post that.

In this example, regardless of what one may think about the efficacy or ethics of a border wall, Poster 2 “stood up a straw man.”

A straw man is a form of argument that creates the impression of refuting an opinion. However, the real underlying idea of the opinion under discussion is not addressed or properly negated. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man” because it’s distinctly unchallenging to knock down a man of such a flimsy substance. 

The typical straw man argument creates the illusion of having completely defeated an opponent's proposition through the covert replacement of it with a different proposition and the subsequent refutation of that false argument ("to knock down a straw man") instead of the opponent's true and original proposition.

There has been a population explosion of straw men on social media.  The modern iteration of the public square is the perfect breeding ground for emotional and reductionist debates about highly charged and nuanced subjects.  Crouched behind the safe anonymity of their screens, people circumvent substantial debate about ideas and condemn the people who hold them. This is referred to as an ad hominem attack (as exemplified above) and fuels our hyper-polarized and balkanized society. 

I want to propose an alternative approach for public debate. “Steelmanning.” No, it’s not a series of high-intensity work-out videos. It is actually a debate technique that I have adopted which has emerged directly out of penning this weekly missive. 

As a general note, I make my absolute best efforts to tackle thorny topics respectfully, thoughtfully and with research that conforms to a journalistic code of ethics. My goal is to stimulate complex, long-wave conversations that transcend the parameters of social media’s tight goal posts. However, I freely admit to making plenty of mistakes and that there are people that not only possess opposing viewpoints, but also have profound expertise on particular topics that I do not. I hear from them. And I have become very grateful for their thorough and scrupulous criticism because that is how I learn and grow.

Steelmanning could be considered the opposite of strawmanninng. Here is how it works:

·      Identify an opinion you have on a particular issue.

·      Find someone that disagrees with your position.

·      Humbly listen to her opinion, while discarding your own pre-existing bias (to the degree that it is possible).

·      Fully ingest and process her argument.

·      Attempt to re-express her position clearly, vividly, and fairly out loud to her.

·      Enumerate any points of agreement (especially if they are not matters of general or widespread agreement).

Some additional texture. Before jumping into this exercise, commit to a thorough, thoughtful inventory that girds your original position. Gather facts and data from reliable, ethical sources to support your opinion. Ideally, find a partner who is thoughtful and shares the spirit of this joint exercise. When listening, do so without facially expressing dismay or disgust. Note what information triggers you and note where you are most intrigued. In the re-expression of her position, focus on the best and most compelling parts of her argument.

And if winning an argument is really what drives you, Steelmanning is perhaps the sharpest of weapons, since you hone your own argument by thoroughly understanding the most convincing elements of the opposing view. 

This technique also works in reverse where your partner will steelman you. This exercise is done preferably in person or on Zoom as visual interaction is usually less dehumanizing. You may choose to record it so that you can re-experience it and also model it for others. If you can’t find a willing opponent, you can practice with someone by simply assuming the opposing roles. 

This drill yields myriad results. It produces more fortified opinions. It creates the possibility for common ground by humanizing your rival. Through the free exchange of ideas, novel and more evolved positions may cream to the top. It rounds the edges of our codified and binary ideological boxes. This debate between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson provides an excellent example of this technique.

Steelmanning, however, is more than a nifty debate technique. It is a potent personal development tool.

It develops humility and tolerance by forcing you to assume that the people with whom you disagree, as much as you might dislike them and their ideas, still have something to teach you. It fosters empathy and compassion, counteracting our impulse to quickly dismiss or declare victory. It broadens our minds by pushing the limits of what we might consider possible. It develops humility and our ability to listen. It roots us in logic and rationality by underscoring the notion that we are debating ideas, not debasing people. It reminds us that our adversaries are poorly founded opinions, not fellow humans. And we should focus on eradicating flawed ideas, not dehumanizing those who hold them.

A healthy liberal democracy requires public discourse and, by extension, a proper forum to have it. The theory of the “marketplace of ideas,” stemming from the writings of John Stuart Mill and John Milton, posits that the free dissemination of ideas creates a social process in which truth competes and eventually wins out over falsehood. Of course, these great minds were philosophizing before social media, which I have exhaustively prosecuted as an abysmal sandbox for thoughtful debate. While Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are likely permanent fixtures in our public house, I highly encourage people to check their trigger fingers and, when possible, migrate their arguments off of these platforms and challenge folks to engage in more humanizing environs. 

I look forward to employing the steel man technique in the upcoming Commune town halls, a series of online events we are planning with the goal of fostering thoughtful, respectful conversations around salient societal issues.

Please feel free to share with me any experiences you have utilizing this technique. Email me at jeffk@onecommune.com. In return, I will send you a photo of our new cat who is missing his tail. I call him Steelman.

The Other Epidemic

We’re late for soccer. It’s always the elusive shin guards, hunkered away in some shadowy corner. I suppose I, too, might sequester at the prospect of the flailing cleats and errant kicks of 10-year old girls.

Lolli sanctifies punctuality, an odd proclivity for a girl her age. Any remote intimation of tardiness plugs the chatterbox, that normally lives inside her head, into a speaker and an endless stream of anxious inner dialogue is amplified out into the world. I wonder where she gets this loquacity.

I am channeling all my parental empathy to pull back from DEFCON 5. Lolli is fiddling with the AYSO app, checking the game schedule for the tenth time, when she discovers that I am the parent responsible for bringing this week’s snack. F*cking snack. Obviously, I have not procured the cursed snack. 

This post-game pastime is often more sacred than the game itself. Somehow, when a parent provides a superlative snack, there is a mystical halo effect that gilds the child a profound sense of belonging and confidence.

The beleaguered designated parent, saddled with bulging satchels of mystery grub, are eyed with the scrutiny of a military aid carrying the nuclear football. Hushed whispers weave their web, “What’s the snack going to be today?”

Any consternation about potential lateness is now usurped by the absence of snack. Lolli’s countenance matches the color of her crimson jersey. She’s apoplectic. 

The moment has arrived for me to activate my rarely invoked Zen master super powers. I drop Lolli at the pitch and assess the situation. Can I acquire a satisfactory snack and return in time for my part of the sporting ritual, the nervous pacing of the sidelines punctuated by the occasional bark of encouragement?

Lolli’s games are at Johnnie Cochran Middle School just off Crenshaw Boulevard in Mid City, Los Angeles. The non-descript appellation, Mid City, is appropriate in exactly the way you might imagine; an endless straggle of asphalt in every direction, pocked by bi-level mini-malls and fast-food fare from Arby’s to El Pollo Loco. Google Maps tells me there are no less than a dozen 7-Elevens within the throw of a stone. In the hopes of finding something with a semblance of nutritional value, I am looking, in vain, for a grocery story. I just start driving.

Finally, nestled between a 99-cent store and a laundromat, I spot a pile-up of grocery carts in front of a concrete fortress, the contents of which is only drearily revealed by a lime-green neon sign spelling ARKET, the “M” having met an untimely death. I park, hustle in and survey the savannah for options. There is an aisle completely dedicated to soda and sport drink of every fluorescent hue. Another reserved for savory chips of all geometries. And yet another preserved almost exclusively for variations of Oreos. There is also ketchups and sauces, spreads and breads.

If you were to pick up any single one of these items and read the label, they would share one common ingredient: refined sugar. In fact, added sugar is in over 80% of the foods on the grocery store shelf. And, in food deserts like this one, the percentage is even higher.

This missive is not a dissertation on sugar, the food industry or obesity. I couldn’t possibly address the depth of this scourge on society within the parameters of this article.  If you want thorough, researched information about the public health and socio-political implications of processed food and refined sugar then read or listen to Dr. Robert Lustig or Dr. Mark Hyman. Still, here are some broad points.

The consumption of sugar and sugary sweeteners, mostly in the form of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), has skyrocketed over the past 100 years. In 1915, the average annual sugar consumption per person was 17.5 pounds. As of 2011, the number rose to 150 pounds of sugar per person annually. 

The average American now consumes 30 teaspoons (or 120 grams) of sugar per day. That is approximately double the US government recommendation. A significant portion of this supplemental sugar is delivered in beverage form. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 12 oz. can of Mountain Dew contains 46.5 grams of sugar. More startling though is the prevalence of sugar in beverages that are marketed as part of a healthy lifestyle like sport “hydration” drinks. Or consider a 20 oz. bottle of Sobe Energize Green Tea, an innocuous, even purportedly “enlightened,” thirst quencher, which packs a whopping 61 grams.

Table sugar (sucrose) is a disaccharide compromised of glucose and fructose which, in digestion, are separated and metabolized very differently. Glucose provides calories for cells. The liver turns excess fructose into fat. Fructose is known to induce leptin resistance and greatly increase the risk of developing obesity. As leptin plays an important role in regulating hunger, suppressing leptin release can produce an insatiable appetite and lead to over-consumption.

Why is high-fructose corn syrup so omnipresent? It’s cheap, about half the price of cane sugar, largely because the Big Food industry and corn refiners having successfully lobbied for subsidies that are guaranteed through the Farm Bill. The production of high-fructose corn syrup (and other sweeteners) under their true cost of production is a citizen-funded, government-enabled grant to companies like Coca-Cola who pack their drinks with sodium to make your thirstier and mask it with cheap HFCS. This allows Big beverage to market its product in increasingly larger portion size. We have all witnessed, and perhaps experienced, the 44 oz. Big Gulp, the daily consumption of which will yield fifty-seven pounds of fat by year’s end.

What is the by-product of ubiquitous high fructose corn syrup (and processed food in general)? From 2000 through 2018, the prevalence of obesity in the United States increased from 30.5% to 42.4%. What is obese? Obesity in adults is defined as a body mass index (BMI) of greater than or equal to 30. BMI is calculated as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared, rounded to one decimal place. To save you some math, a BMI of 30 for someone 6 feet tall is 222 pounds. A BMI of 40 (severely obese) is 295 pounds. And the prevalence of severe obesity has increased in the last 20 years from 4.7% to 9.2%. For comparison, obesity rates in China hovers around 6%. Little doubt remains that there is a correlation between sugar consumption and obesity rates.

Sugar is also known to suppress the immune system. Just by consuming 100 grams of sugar can suppress white blood cell function by 40% for at least 5 hours. 

Why interrupt your Sunday brunch with this disquisition on the evils of sugar at this very moment?  Because while COVID-19 is a nasty, highly transmissible and potentially fatal virus, lurking behind the pandemic, is a more pervasive and insidious epidemic. We consume too much sugar. We are increasingly obese and living with chronic disease and inflammation. In our immune compromised state, we increase our susceptibility to viruses.

Escalating obesity prevalence is directly tied to sky-rocketing rates of chronic disease, most notably diabetes. There are 35 million American adults (10.5% of the population) with Type 1 diabetes and nearly 100 million additional people that are pre-diabetic. The estimated domestic total economic cost of diagnosed diabetes in 2017 was $327 billion. 

There is a distinct socio-economic component to these data that often correspond with racial inequities. Black men are 7% more likely to be obese than white men. And Black women are the most disproportionally impacted group with obesity rates at 57% (17 points higher than white women). Comorbidities, the simultaneous presence of two chronic diseases or conditions in a patient, such as obesity and diabetes have contributed to a COVID-19 age-adjusted fatality rate among Black Americans that is 3.7 times White Americans.

I cast no aspersions on people carrying extra weight. My childhood chubbiness and its accompanying self-esteem issues have been thoroughly documented in my prior screeds. And, in full candor, I am currently in a knife fight with a pair of muffin tops that are cresting over my belt loops as I approach 50. To be clear, being healthy should not be confused with the commodification of wellness which projects unattainable images of perfection in attempt to create a feeling of deficiency and then markets products and services to address that perceived lack. Being well is not about appearance. It’s about health and, thus, should not be judged.

The media floods us with daily stratagem to address the riddle of snowballing COVID diagnoses. Indeed, there was a point when America could have followed the lead of other nations and quashed the spread through well-documented policies that include a combination of personal responsibility and governmental leadership. These tactics include mask-wearing, social distancing and personal hygiene in combination with mass testing, contact tracing and the curbing of superspreading events. (By most estimates, just 10 to 20 percent of coronavirus infections account for 80 percent of transmissions.) Incompetent leadership may have ironically informed a new strategy for international terrorism. “Leave the United States alone. They’ll do themselves in.”

While there is a glut of newscasters, scientists and CDC officials hammering home important, if conventional, policies, there is a deafening silence from the media and the mainstream medical community around personal health, the pre-COVID ground conditions in America that have led to such widespread transmissions and fatalities (5.2MM cases and 166,000 deaths at publishing).

There is data emerging suggesting a correlation between excess weight and COVID-19 severity.

A recent OpenSAFELY study reports the risk of dying from COVID-19 increased by 27% among obese individuals and was doubled in patients with a body mass index greater than 40.

In a prospective cohort study of patients with COVID-19 from New York City, the prevalence of diabetes and obesity was higher in individuals admitted to hospitals than those not admitted to hospitals (34.7% vs 9.7% for diabetes and 39.5% vs 30.8% for obesity, respectively).

Instead of celebrating the elixir of binges, from Chubby Hubby to Netflix, that has conspired to coin the term “the COVID fifteen” (referring to weight gain from inactivity during quarantine), we could be seizing this moment to have an initiative for public health: 

·      To promote exercise, mindfulness practices and proper nutrition as a means to build healthy immunity.

·      To take on Big Food and hold them accountable by, at the very least, internalizing their true costs.

·      To educate widely on nutrition, promote cooking and community gardens.

·      To provide incentives for grocery to enter underserved neighborhoods and stock fruits and vegetable.

·      To make SNAP benefits redeemable online such that these services can deliver to underserved communities.

·      To consider taxes on egregious products (similar to cigarette tax).

·      To enlarge the FVRx program (fruit and vegetable prescription program for children).

·      Pass a new Farm Bill.

There is very little public discourse focused on what we need to do to improve the underlying well-being of society. And while robust immune systems are not going to protect us from more lethal viruses (like Ebola), there is plenty of good reason to address the underlying roots causes of our societal dis-ease. We can leverage this moment to invest in our communal health or continue lining the pockets of Big Pharma to incessantly treat the mal-effects.

Further, well-being must cease to be a class privilege. Running, walking, practicing yoga, core exercise and meditating require time but virtually no financial resources. If you could benefit from a free yoga or meditation course to jumpstart your wellness routine, please email me. The access both logistically and financially to high quality food, however, must be addressed. 

Enough confabulating, I am late for kick-off. I return to the game sheepishly with my bags of treats. Fifteen individually packaged bags of chips, a case of juice boxes, a pack of Chips Ahoy and a watermelon that I manage to carve up with an old library card.

The Red Devils are crushed 8-1, mostly due to the opposition’s pair of dazzling Brazilian twins. The mourning quickly dissipates though as snack is unveiled. Lolli, who knows my sugar rant too well, is relieved by my selections. She gives me a nod as if to acknowledge and assuage the wave of hypocritical guilt she knows I am surfing. The team drowns their sorrows in corn syrup. Finally, out of pure sympathy, a compassionate mom reaches for a jagged slice of watermelon. We look at each other, then together at the kids and simultaneously shrug in resignation.

A Bedtime Fairy Tale

I am putting my daughter, Micah, to sleep and she asks me, “Daddy, if you could have one wish, what would it be?”

Considering tonight is my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, I am inclined to tell her that my wish would be for her to put herself to sleep, but that seems cruel, so I demur. If there is one parental pastime that I dread and will miss in profound and equal measure, it is this ritual. It tests both psychological endurance and physical dexterity. I summon and spin the same thread-bare yarns of childhood, listening attentively for the parasympathetic breath of slumber. Not yet free, I plot my exodus, furtively sidling toward the edge of the bed. Like a parole officer sensing illicit activity, Micah rolls over and imprisons my mid-section with her flopping and now lifeless arm.

“I’m not asleep yet. Tell me the story of when you met mommy.”

It’s 1988. Long-haired and rumpled in my favorite flannel, I sat in the back row of freshman art class. If it had been possible, I would have opted for a desk on the scaffolding outside the window, anything to avoid the icy gaze of the persnickety art history teacher. Miss DePoint was preternaturally tall, always in a well-fitted skirt suit, her tight grey bob accentuating her angular chin. She wielded a yardstick that she used as a pointer and, at any moment, she could have pivoted toward me, Jadis-like, endlessly long, and turned me to stone. She flashed Bernini on the overhead projector and tapped at the screen rhythmically with her lengthy wand.

With clockwork precision, Schuyler, still in her talc-y leotard, sauntered into class five minutes late and folded her sinewy frame into the seat diagonal from me. Completely unfazed by Miss DePoint’s displeasure, she fetched a grapefruit from her dance bag, clawed both hands into its top and ripped back the peel. This vigorous action unbottled an aerosol of grapefruit particulates that, like fairy dust, infused the back of the room. As the citrus cloud enveloped me, I fell under a mystical spell.

And, in a moment, we were sculpture. Hovering above her, I thrust my golden arrow into her heart. She, with her head thrown back, lay in a state of transcendent bliss. The ecstasy of Saint Theresa. This was the epiphany that shuttered my faithless childhood and launched my devotion to Schuyler.

My chivalrous pursuit of this maiden knew no bounds. I boarded my trusty 4-wheeled steed and stalked my quarry stealthily from city block to city block. I learned to speak with my hands, like her. I rambled barefoot on the perilous terrain of upper Manhattan, slaying the dragons of my motherless adolescence. Until one night, intertwined, we collapsed right on the sidewalk of Amsterdam Avenue and lay there for hours, baring full witness to our eternal embrace.

“You still awake, Micah?”

“Daddy, tell me the part where you and mom get old.”

“Well, we’re not exactly old yet but…”

See-sawing between lover and beloved, we romped across campgrounds and far-flung hostels, slept in hammocks and in the hallways of train cars. We learned foreign tongues and stole across borders. We owned little and wanted for nothing.

As adulthood knocked, I climbed beanstalks of steel and glass and spun straw to gold with both ardor and folly. Schuyler stepped onto stages, to act out the plays of others and play out the acts of self. We toiled, built studios, launched festivals, forged friendships and scrawled books. We raised the chalice in victory and we suffered epic defeats at the hands of neighboring kingdoms.

The human story is the accrual of hundreds of these triumphs and just as many failures which slowly, against our will, begets wisdom.

Commitment is often misconstrued as limitation and framed within the parentheses of sacrifice, of what one must give up. However, the bedrock of our unconditional mutual pledge has allowed us to take madcap risks and chase uncertain dreams, knowing, that in failure, there is the comfort of allegiance to break our fall. In this way, we have known commitment only as freedom.

And then we had three little bears with goldy locks. (My mighty rapier valiantly delivered three consecutive X chromosomes, if only to avoid a duel over circumcision.) And, with three princesses, we were summarily dethroned, usurped from the center of our own universe. No longer the nucleus, we became electrons looking in on life, not out at it.

Self-obsession dissolves when you would die, without a moment’s hesitation, for someone else. And this phenomenon of parenthood transforms the geometry of love from a linear affair between partners, to a multi-dimensional shared consecration of your children.

Young, unruly chaotic lust gives way to care, respect and also distinctly unmagical transaction. No longer is our love the rapturous, intertwined passion of teenagers on a city sidewalk. We’re more linked paper clips than a double helix, free to go our separate ways until the curved edges of our union pull us back in line. It’s an officious type of middle-aged tenderness. I love you. Pass the hole puncher.

Who will drive the carriage to procure provisions? Who will deliver the girls unto seminary or to the athletic pitch? Who will pay the state tariffs and manage the gold? But the fairy tale need not completely become the laundry list.

Over time, devoted partners fulfill each other’s needs. In the absence of need, a profound sort of love springs forth. Love, in this way, is not an emotion that visits the castle as a party guest only to leave before the strike of midnight. In wholeness, one becomes the source of love, not the subject that perceives it as transitory sensation.

Your mother and I were two young saplings planted too close together. We are often now indistinguishable from each other, not just because our gnarled tree trunks have fused, but because our love, as essence, impervious to the vacillations of space and time, is not separable.

On my best days, I still feel like in a painting. Dreamy, not altogether of this place. I want to tear her away from this dull care. And walk and talk and do nothing and leave nothing undone.

“Can you go to sleep now, sweetheart?”

“Ok. Daddy, but just answer me. If you could have one wish, what would it be?”

I ponder. She can sense I have an answer now. Could it be a trip to Disneyland? Or a Pomeranian? Perhaps a new trampoline?

“Micah, I wish your mother and I, a long time from now, will die on the same day.”

I feel guilty giving her this macabre answer. But what her mind cannot grasp, her heart understands easily. She gives me a hug. I forget that she is closer to God than I am.

“Good night brave sir Micah. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Walking Among the Divine

I am hiking the canyon loop, hunting ideas. I am edgy due to the constant ominous rustling in the brush along the path. Lizards darting, rabbits bounding, thrashers thrashing, rattlers slithering, imaginaries lurking. Nature welcomes home a long-lost cousin, wresting me from thought into the precarious present.

This experience, man wandering through the wood alone, senses sharpened, is old. For a moment, there is little that seems to separate me from the hominid forager ambling an East African savannah 70 millennia ago.

Except she walked among the divine, sharing her footpath with woodland gods and an occasional drunken satyr. Her tribe worshipped local deities that governed fire, rain, and the moon. Neighboring clans had their own provincial spirits. Moreover, she felt inextricably connected to her surroundings so much so that she shared a spiritual essence with the rock on which she stepped and the leaves that brushed her face.

With the decline of animism and the rise of Abrahamic traditions, God retired from earth. He moved to the putting green in the sky, slipped on a robe, grew a hipster beard, donned a Merlin’s cap and absconded from the earthly plane.

This cleaving of the material and the mystical altered the way we understand and treat our worldly artifacts. We often perceive objects in the physical plane as devoid of divinity and, by extension, disposable.

Can you imagine the mystical wonder a Bic lighter might have inspired a million years ago as Homo Erectus sought to domesticate fire? In your mind’s eye, envision the tribe huddled in awe around this neon yellow tube of plastic-encased butane, jabbing at its flint, agog as the flame springs forth. A gift from the Gods, it lies upon a hallowed shrine guarded assiduously by the bravest warriors. Now available in a 4-pack for 99 cents.

Discarded mindlessly along with…

Plastic water bottles, party cups, straws, take-out containers, bottle caps, gift wrapping, coffee cups & lids, food packaging, plastic cutlery, outdated iPhones, antiquated stereo systems, drawers of chords and adapters. All whirlpooling around a gyre in the Pacific Ocean twice the size of Texas. Out of sight, out of mind.

These artifacts of modernity are produced with the uniformity and efficiency that capitalism selects for. They signify almost nothing to us.

In many ways, our climate catastrophe is rooted in a self-authored story. In our quest to understand the nature of reality, give our lives meaning and establish structures of ethics, we concoct mythologies, the authorship of which we often attribute to the supernatural. The widespread acceptance of these myths become our inter-subjective understanding of the world and through them, humanity maintains a semblance of order.

Our Abrahamic scrolls gave humans dominion over nature and animals, useful authority for the agricultural revolution. This axiom is dubious not just because humans are quite literally animals of nature but also because it is at odds with our own experience of spirituality. Our epiphanies, our brief moments of divine connection, so often occur when we are re-immersed in nature.

But is there nothing sacred in the material? What about the hand-carved heart stone my daughter gave me to pack on long trips? Or my late grandfather’s Naval dog tags? Or the heirloom locket that carries the bleached images of my immigrant story?

Think of the dress that your mother seamed and hemmed for you, how precious and irreplaceable it is. Consider the connectedness it holds. She made it especially for you with all its oddities and imperfections. When you wear it, or just look at it, she is in the room with you.  Now consider the dress sewn in a Chinese sweatshop on the rack at Marshall’s for $9.99 hung beside 100 frocks just like it. It’s a standardized commodity made by someone completely anonymous. It elicits nothing.

Material objects can be sacred and embody the divine when they are unique and interrelated, when they hold a story.

Envision your sacred space, the place where you write, pray or meditate. It is not littered with plastic tchotchkes. Perhaps there is a photo there of your grandmother or a family treasure she gave you when you married or graduated. Maybe there are the mala beads you wore on your pilgrimage to Rishikesh. Or the novel you dog-eared when you hit rock bottom.

Better yet, visualize your ideal sanctum where you would be able to excavate and bare your soul. How much more deeply could you plumb the depths of your creative or spiritual self if you were to animate your surroundings with real value?

 And what if we were to inspire the mundane? Can we alter our habits such that the contents of our closets and refrigerators more closely resemble the intention of our altar space?

Schuyler nearly fainted the other day when she waltzed into the kitchen to find me making my own oat milk. Admittedly, Phoebe had emptied the pre-packaged version and I was desperate for an iced coffee. But it really wasn’t that difficult. And I savored that homemade iced latte as if I were sipping the sacramental wine from the Eucharist cup.

Often the only sacrifice we must make to feel a greater sense of connectedness is convenience. We are so concerned with losing time, that we misspend it.

The circle of my hike is closing. And I laugh at myself. Nature is not rustling about me. I am the raucous interloper here, trudging heavy-footed through a forsaken habitat forgiving enough to still welcome me.

If we are to pursue spiritually rich, globally sustainable lives then we must dispense of the dualism that separates the realms of the sacred and the material. We must hand stitch them back together. We must eschew the disposable and value the unique, the necessary, and the objects that become the artifacts of our personal story. The entire physical world must become our altar space.

Navigating Post-Truth

On November 22, 1963, Arthur and Adeline sink into their divan to digest their chicken salad sandwiches. Per their post-lunch ritual, they flip on their guilty pleasure, As the World Turns. Just minutes into the program, the soap opera is interrupted by a news flash concerning an incident in Dallas, Texas with the Presidential motorcade. The episode continues only to be suspended again just minutes later. 

Flanked by rotary phones and typewriters, Walter Cronkite appears in the CBS newsroom. As he reports on the developing story, he is handed a memo. Cronkite removes his signature glasses and, in his inimitable tenor, announces the death of John F. Kennedy. For just a moment, Cronkite, visibly shaken, looks down and to the side, tightening his lips to hold the anguish of a nation. Lyndon Johnson will now become the 36th president of the United States. Adeline looks at Arthur and begins to cry. Arthur grips her hand reassuringly, “It’s ok. We’ll get through this.” 

This is how my grandparents and the rest of America got their news. Walter Cronkite, dubbed “the most trusted man in America,” was the anchorman for the CBS Evening News for 19 years. It didn’t much matter where you stood on the political spectrum, when Cronkite said it, it was accepted fact.

People of all ideological bents could bicker and debate their opinions, but diverging views were girded in a shared inter-subjective understanding of truth. While certainly not infallible, the institution of journalism, with its code of ethics, independent fact-checking, multiple sources, and corrigendum engendered trust.

Hurtling through history alongside journalism, as if in a three-legged race towards progress, was science. Arthur credited technology for eradicating infectious disease, widespread famine and ending World War II. When I interviewed Adeline about how technology had impacted her life, she delivered an unexpected, if pre-feminist, answer. Evidently, the washer-dryer saved her twenty hours per week, which she used to volunteer at the local hospital. They were both starry-eyed with wonder as Apollo sent back images from the moon. 

Science, like religion, provides us with a way to understand the world, where we come from and where we are going. However, science has proven more protean than other true world theories or Abrahamic traditions as it did not require blind fealty or incessant referrals back to old desert scrolls. Instead, it looked forward, humbly asking the question, “why?” And, not unlike journalism, it addressed its inquiries through a rigorous method of hypothesis, experimentation, observation, reasoning and determination.

Science and journalism, the way the world works and the medium through which we access that information, were the dual pillars of social cohesion for my grandparents’ generation.

However, in 21st century America, this ceases to be true. We lie scattered, matches flung from a box.

Nowhere is this fracturing of society more apparent than in this pandemic. More than just a health crisis of epic proportions, COVID-19 in the United States is an epidemic of social polarization. The countries that have cohered around fairly straightforward solutions have stanched the viral spread, while those unable to unify are bickering their way into dystopia. 

Certainly, this is partially due to illiberal leadership peddling “alternative facts,” which slowly erodes the riverbanks of long-trusted institutions. Experts, despite years of study and research, are often pilloried as nothing more than effete, out-of-touch intellectuals. 

But the erosion of a coherent narrative of unifying facts knitting our country together cannot simply be chalked up to deepening partisanship and the constant drone of “fake news.”  Medical science, for example, has sown its own seeds of mistrust, capitulating in many cases to big pharma. With misaligned incentives, pharmaceutical companies have biased studies and shrouded truth at human expense. Vioxx, a Merck drug developed for arthritis, caused 38,000 fatal heart attacks. OxyContin (Purdue Pharma) and other prescription opioids have killed 500,000 Americans. Proxy agricultural “science” has decimated our soil. There have been over 13,000 lawsuits filed against Monsanto in connection with its herbicide, glyphosate, which allegedly causes cancer. 

Science, which once promised to deliver us from drudgery and the darkness of superstition, has so often been kidnapped by unfettered corporatism that it has squandered its moral credibility. That these very same companies - Bayer, Merck, P&G, GlaxoSmithKline and others – pump billions of marketing dollars into our media outlets elicits a well-founded skepticism about journalistic independence. Vioxx, in its time, was the most widely marketed pharmaceutical in history.

In the absence of trusted sources of fact, it becomes all too easy to fall prey to dystopic conspiracies of a New World Order. The decentralization of media distribution, which gives game show hosts and wellness influencers equal footing to news organizations as vectors for the proliferation of information, contributes to the unbridled spread of conspiracy theories – some that may be true, and many that lack any basis in fact. 

If you espouse the notion that 5G is a means for spreading the coronavirus, you can find dozens of message boards and content to confirm your bias. In fact, you don’t need to find them as those posts will simply find you through social media algorithms and artificial intelligence. Despite having no factual basis, activists that believe 5G is the agent for COVID have destroyed communication towers across Europe and even in Bolivia (where 5G doesn’t even exist).

However, not all conspiracy theories are as specious or malicious as Pizzagate, Birtherism, and the denial of Sandy Hook. If I told you that a private prison company funded an organization comprised of legislators and private sector executives to write and pass legislation leading to mass incarceration, you might think I was wacko. But this is exactly what the Corrections Corporation of America and the American Legislative Exchange Council did. Conspiracies are seductive because truth is often just as strange and twisted as fiction.

No political leaning has a monopoly on conspiracy. There is a bizarre emergent horse-shoeing of leftist conspiritualists and alt-right libertarians that is coming to a head around the potentially impending COVID vaccine, ratcheting up an already intense vaccination debate. This anti-vaxx alliance makes strange bedfellows of a slice of the “wellness” community, who sanctifies sovereignty over their bodies, civil liberties advocates who oppose governmental overreach, and “truthers” who fear that the illuminati will implant micro-chips as part of mass vaccination.

Last Friday, I had lunch with the nephew of John Kennedy, whose assassination could be seen as the grandfather of all conspiracies. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has built a prolific career as an environmental litigator, winning hundreds of millions of dollars in class action suits against giant corporate polluters including DuPont and ExxonMobil. He recently prosecuted the California case against Monsanto for its use of the herbicide glyphosate. His record of representing indigenous and disadvantaged peoples is nothing less than sterling. His career has been defined by his rigorous application of science. Yet, he is an outspoken critic of mass vaccination, an issue that is currently so incendiary that intelligent debate is essentially nonextant.

To be clear, I support safe vaccination and clearly acknowledge the role immunization has played in eradicating small pox, taming other infectious diseases and even preventing cervical cancer. I sat across the table from Robert, a healthy dollop of skepticism on my polenta, for three hours. Robert possesses a charismatic and unparalleled fluency around vaccination, from case law and legislation to medical data and peer-reviewed science. He is of the few who ingests and comprehends primary source data. I challenge anyone to sit and listen to Robert’s highly researched, if passionate, opinion and not believe that the notion of administering over 20 vaccines (the recommended schedule is itself contentious) to young children isn’t at least worthy of some intelligent public discussion. But, currently, there is just all-caps screaming on Facebook.

With all of the countervailing forces at work, what is a citizen to do? What are we supposed to believe? How do we distinguish between ludicrous theories devised to divide and true corruption that warrants exposure? How do we find the social cohesion that is necessary not only to beat COVID but to address all of our salient global problems?

How much longer can we keep loving America and hating each other? Human success has always been predicated on our ability to cooperate flexibly at scale. Without social cohesion, we are chimps.

In my recent interview with Charles Eisenstein, he asked me, “Jeff, are you willing to be wrong for the sake of society?” I began to think about all the petty things in my own life that I have been wrong about. Schuyler told me a thousand times that taking Advil and Tums were bad for me. Stubbornly, I dismissed her until I learned that NSAIDs and antacids contribute to intestinal permeability, which was keeping me in a perpetual state of inflammation. I thought about the time I tried to drive my family to Vermont during hurricane Irene. Thankfully, Schuyler convinced me to stay in Connecticut as that storm veered west and devastated the Green Mountain state. I’ll stop here because I could write a book about all the times Schuyler has been right. Maybe I will, after she’s passed.

Indeed, the history of progress is the story of being wrong. The earth is flat. The sun orbits around it. Disease spreads through the bad air of rotting organic matter. Pythagoras, Galileo, Pasteur and indeed every ground-breaking scientist and philosopher challenged the paradigms of their time. And these affronts on the status quo are often quite unpopular. What progress across history does share, however, is critical thinking. And this may provide some flickering candlelight in the dark cave in which we find ourselves. The difference between thoughtful skepticism and fallacious conspiracy may be called wisdom.

As institutions wobble, individual citizens inherit a growing responsibility for the cohesion of society. Be inquisitive. Be humble. Think deeply and critically. Engage with and learn from others. Understand the best part of an opposing opinion. Apply methods of rigor in the quest for truth. Be willing to admit you are wrong. 

Walter Cronkite isn’t coming back.

Who Am I?

We all have a story.

A dozen years ago, I co-founded Wanderlust, a company that produces large yoga festivals around the world. Our flagship event in Squaw Valley, California amassed enough yogis in leggings to swaddle the Taj Mahal in lycra. In the summer of 2012, I arrived on-site at our host hotel, the somewhat tattered Village-at-Squaw. Knackered from the trip, I was intent on quickly checking in to my usual ski condo and getting to our production meeting. As the stoner-cum-concierge bumbled through an unnecessary ream of clerical work, my patience began to fray. And I said it. It’s the only time I have ever uttered this phrase and I shudder in the paternalism of it even as I type. 

“Do you know who I am?” I said.

Befuddled, the desk clerk looked at me, turned to his counterpart and said, “This dude I’m checking in doesn’t know who he is.”

The fool speaks wisely as the wise man acts the fool.

Who am I? This is humanity’s nagging question that chases us like a tail. It was famously asked by Ramana Maharshi in the eponymous tome on self-inquiry. Some never ask, suspended in their slumber. But once the shell is cracked, it becomes a life’s pursuit. You remove sheath after sheath, like opening a set of Russian dolls, only to find yet another ontological riddle. I have dog-eared dozens of books trying to solve this conundrum from every available angle. But given the limited word count of this letter, I skip the lighter fare and ask:

Are we simply pure awareness perceiving transitory phenomena from moment to moment?

Or is our identity defined by the continuity of our life’s experiences? Are we the summation of the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves?

It was 1975 and I stood outside in the playground with the other kids. I was a kindergartner at the American School in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The student body was mostly Brazilian with a smattering of foreign nationals from the United States, Britain and other parts of Europe. English was prominent in the classroom. But, on the playground, the linguistic currency was Portuguese, specifically Carioca, the slangy dialect native to Rio.

My absorbent brain sponged in the language with relative ease. We had moved to Rio from Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The transition from Galician Spanish to Portuguese is simpler for the non-conceptual child’s temporal lobe. I was trading in sounds, language as music, not as vocabulary lessons. Of course, I was dragged into fluency by a force greater than anything cognitive; the innate instinct to belong. 

The yard outside the main building was sloped at one end. And it was a favorite pastime to run along the flat section, then jump on to your bum and slide down the embankment. The grass had given way to dirt halfway down forming a landing strip of sorts. This was a ritual that I assiduously avoided. My body was not built for such nimble maneuvers. I was chubby. My paunch hung over my jeans. My thighs chafed just enough to wear down the denim between my legs to a thread-bare smoothness. 

I parked myself on the sidelines listening to the school bully, Bobbito, direct traffic down the slope. The soundscape was chaotic. What possessed me I don’t remember, but a sudden surge of confidence thrust me into line and I poised myself the best I could. My turn. And I ran towards the slope, flung myself awkwardly forward like a baby robin in first flight. It wasn’t the smoothest landing and no distance records were set, but I did it. I made it down the hill. A couple barks of “Americano” my reward.

More sure of myself now, I trudged back up the hill and back into the queue. I cinched my belt a notch, tugged on my polo. This approach had more verve. I launched up, landed on my butt. And heard the sound. Curious how the brain can immediately process sonic phenomena into material reality. It was a ripping noise that made all other aspects of existence momentarily cease. I had torn my jeans straight down the crack of my ass. What’s more, my tighty-whitey underwear, now available to the yard, had been stained by the dirt path. 

This sent Bobbito into paroxysms of rapturous laughter as he belted out, “The American shat his pants.” The infectious refrain was repeated again and again. “The American shat his pants. The American shat his pants.” A catchy tune it must have been as it echoed across the yard. I stood at the bottom of the slope, nowhere to hide, eyes welled, lip bit, naked less my cloak of self-loathing and embarrassment.

Fight, flight, freeze or, in this case, find the angle from which the least amount of people can see your stained underwear and shuffle back to the classrooms. Finally, off the Serengeti, and back into the relative safety of the admin building, I found my backpack and did my best to sling it cumbersomely behind me in attempt to camouflage my predicament. I limped into the nurse’s office purporting an awful headache, one that apparently must have caused the nurse to think I shat my pants. “I must go home,” I told her. 

My mother was summoned and dutifully arrived. I made my brisk walk of shame back across the yard clumsily, as if I was in a three-legged race with myself. One last lingering coda of the “The American shat his pants” faded into the distance. 

This was the story of my youth, the hero’s journey inverted, replete with all its classic shadow archetypes; the bully, the nurse, the tender mother, the ego, the shame, the self-loathing.

And this tale became the parable of my adulthood; the incessant need to be liked, to assimilate, to seek the approval of others, to base my identity in what other people think of me.

It’s what led me to get into a taxi cab thirty-five years later with my daughters, recognize that the driver was Pakistani, and subconsciously muster a thick South Asian accent, “Greenwich Willage, pleece.” My girls looking at me horrified. The cabby eyeballing my khakied whiteness with confusion and pity. I just wanted to connect. 

It took me forty years to understand the difference between fitting in and belonging. Of course, I couldn’t have expected my shit-stained 5-year old self to comprehend it, but Brené Brown finally articulated it perfectly. Fitting in is changing who you are in order to be accepted. Belonging is to be accepted while never compromising your authentic self. 

I have compassion for that chubster. I was simply using the tools I had to survive. However, I now recognize that many of the seeds of my adult shortcomings were planted in this childhood yarn: the lack of self-love that pushed me down that slope in the first place, the false pride not to cry, the lying to the nurse, the shame born out of a lack of empathy for myself. These are all deficiencies of the ego.

Our own personal folklore can so often reinforce negative states of mind and keep us helplessly entangled in our emotional states. In many ways, living in the myths of our past and projecting them into the future keeps us bound to our pain and lost in thought. And it is our identification with this thought that can create the ego or a false sense of “I.” In this way, our suffering is simply a fantasy of our own projection.

A layer pulls back. A doll cracks open to reveal another doll. And I try to move a step beyond.

Now that I look more critically at my story, as humorous as it may be to tell, I wonder if it’s all bullshit. Maybe I slid down that slope and no one even cared? Maybe Bobbito was a voice inside my own head? To some extent, does it even matter? Whether fact or fiction, perhaps my ego sculpted this story to gird a false sense of identity?

And now I author questions because I am questioning my self-authorship, groping for truth in the dark.

Is memory itself is a type of confirmation bias crafted by the psyche to reinforce one’s current assumed identity? Are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves simply the ego’s attempt to retain sovereignty over an illusory self? 

My playground story is among dozens of others that constitute the content of consciousness. And my personhood is certainly connected to the continuity of my life’s experiences. I don’t want to bypass trauma. Awful things can happen to people and that pain is real and must be processed.

However, as I sit in meditation, peeling back the koshas, I leave my satchel of stories, albeit briefly, at the door, if only to pick them up later. Just for an instant, there is a sensation of emptiness. For specks of time, the notion that “I” am somewhere inside my body as the thinker of my thoughts dissolves. I can only suppose this is what Eckhart Tolle means when he reduces “being” to the simple “I Am.” I live nowhere near the enlightened state he inhabits, but I suppose to glimpse it is to know it exists. 

In this wide, fleeting expanse, there is a simple conscious awareness of passing phenomena happening in this moment. And again now. In this quietness, there is truth. And truth has no story.

INTERDEPENDENCE DAY

I am in my happy place, snug in the middle lane of the 101 coasting at a modest 60 miles per hour, listening to The Daily, driving to Topanga with Micah. Schuyler thinks I drive too slowly. I prefer “cautious.” It might be genetic.

My beloved Nana, barely 5 feet in heels, seldom broke 25 on the speedometer. As a young boy, I would often accompany her to her sacred weekly hairdresser appointment. There was a soda fountain there in which I enthusiastically indulged, creating madcap papercup cocktails of Mr. Pibb and Fanta. Eventually, she’d emerge from the chair, grip my hand, her long glossy red nails digging at my forearm skin and lead me out to the mini-mall parking lot.

Automobiles did not spare steel in the 1970’s. Nana would board her colossal Cadillac, often unwittingly parked askew across two spots, like a mouse saddling an elephant. She didn’t drive it as much as it drove her. She’d crawl out of the lot into traffic like a cruise liner leaving port, eyes peering out underneath the top curve of the wheel, nothing but her fabulous frosted red coiffure visible to leery fellow drivers. She would retell the same yarn of her father’s arrival at Ellis Island and then improvise with Ethel Merman schmaltz, “Only in America.” We’d stop to get Carvel. Heaven.

Generally, one podcast episode perfectly fills my commute to Topanga. Fourth of July weekend approaches and host Michael Barbaro is reciting our founding doctrine from our greatest piece of American literature. We know it almost too well, like a prayer we’ve uttered so many times that we forget its meaning: 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator, with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This lofty egalitarian ideal is the plot line of our national mythology. In its time, it was a radical repudiation of feudal European pre-destiny, where you were born either into aristocracy or serfdom and there you remained. This Declaration dispensed with the divine right of kings, ushered in the Enlightenment and anointed individuals with the power to choose their own government.

Of course, we know this national folklore has been so often a fairytale, a false narrative. Just because these rights were scrawled on a parchment did not mean they came for free. Generation after generation, passionately engaged citizens have waged principled battles to better align our human condition with our most cherished principles. And, again, this call beckons. 

When the framers penned the notion of all men as equal, they were certainly not drawing from evolutionary biology. A Darwinian understanding of the world was a century away and, of course, from a genetic perspective, we are all snowflakes. The concept of equality was based in the spiritual, specifically in the Judeo-Christian notion that every person is born with an eternal soul judged equally before God.

Yet, in the same stanza of this Declaration, there is a paradox. The spiritual notion of a land of equals striving for a common good echoed eleven years later in our Constitution by “We the people,” “a common defense,” “general welfare,” “more perfect union” and “United” states exists in stark contrast with inalienable individual entitlements. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness have become increasingly applied to sanctifying the rights of the individual and protecting the ability to own property and amass material wealth. How we square our commonality and individualism has always engendered fierce national debate.

This tug of war between the common good and individual rights, often narrowly reserved for white, straight men and systematically denied to others, has been our messy national story. Slavery to abolition, Jim Crow to civil rights, codified patriarchy to women’s suffrage, discrimination to legalized gay marriage, we inch along, bumper to bumper, down the highway of the moral universe. 

We have, from time to time, coalesced to dull the sharper edges of capitalism: a graduated income tax, social security, unemployment benefits, Medicare and Medicaid, student loans and SNAP.  And we have surfed waves of alternative community-based approaches to living, built on shared resources and distributed leadership.

But that sea has now flattened. And for a good fifty years, America has been dominated by unrepentant individual materialism. Unbridled capitalism, in cahoots with neo-liberalist government, has put its fat finger on the scale, tilting the balance between “we” and “I” so wickedly that, now, three people in the United States own more collective wealth than the bottom 50% combined. Of course, this grotesque inequity is the exact conundrum we set out to address in declaring our independence in the first place.  

From the captain’s chair of my dusty Prius, I reliably estimate that I can see a thousand cars of every conceivable color and size across this sprawling ten-lane superhighway. In front of me and behind, moving with me and against, there are tens of thousands more. Driving these sedans, pickup trucks, 18-wheelers and minivans are operators of every color and creed, race and religion, class and orientation – moving as if under the direction of Esther Williams. 

The thruway is a poignant if banal portrait of a well-oiled social contract. We eschew certain rights to receive greater ones. With minor exception, we don’t drive 120 miles per hour and, in turn, we have the luxury of a road to travel and a safe return home. 

Road traffic serves as a rare alignment of self-interest and common good. We drive mindfully, only as fast as the car in front of us. We brake when needed and let people merge in regardless of tint. The consequences of our autonomous actions are mutual. Recklessness results in a collective wreck. We may not share a destination but we do share a meritocratic destiny. Nobody gets downtown before anyone else.

Here, on the Interstate, the intersection of shared humanity and self-preservation, the common good and individual rights, is in perfect and ordinary lockstep. Our individual freedoms are dependent on each other.

As I take the Topanga exit, I can’t help but superimpose this metaphor on COVID, which is again spiking dramatically across the United States with 40,000 new daily cases. The solution to stanching the spread is, or was, hidden in plain sight. There is a playbook that other countries have successfully executed: mask-wearing, social distancing, identifying clusters, extensive testing and contact tracing, and quarantine of the infected. It works. And businesses can remain partially open. But this plan is predicated on social cohesion stemming from the willingness of an entire citizenry to put social good above perceived self-interest. In other words, you must get in your lane, put on some music, go slow, and shut the fuck up. Eventually, you’ll get there.

I can only imagine the patriotic pride felt among Kiwis, Taiwanese, Irish, Norwegians and Icelanders. Through shared sacrifice, they collectively stepped up to meet the greatest public health challenge of the millennia and conquered it, together. Yet in America - with our competing masks of patriotism - our greatest enemy has become each other. Our much-celebrated rugged individualism not only currently prevents us from entering Europe but many Americans cannot even travel to Connecticut. 

In the end, there is both an irony and a beauty to the communal embrace of interdependence; a realization that our individual freedoms and the collective good are actually one and the same.

And perhaps our framers, despite their personal hypocrisies, were wise enough to comprehend this.

There is a spiritual lesson in this and it’s not a novel one: The self is illusory. And this illusion, the notion that we are all distinct individuals living among other separate individuals in an external universe, is at the core of income inequality, racism, climate change, the unfettered spread of COVID and just about every other source of human misery. Our ability to solve these existential riddles will stem from a collective spiritual revelation as much as political resolve. 

Does this tragedy end like others? The king, who daily dons an orange mask in front of his vanity but is too proud to wear a real one, gets the virus. With this Machiavellian thought, I laugh in despair, but not too hard. I’m driving after all. And I may harbor some ill will, but I wish no one ill.

I think about my Nana telling me stories in the car, fables of America and the promise of its dream. I glance at Micah wondering what stories am I going to tell her children’s children? 

Wishing all a Happy Interdependence Day.

WORDS MATTER

In early April, during the depths of the “first” quarantine, Phoebe had a series of Vesuvian eruptions, the kind only a teenager can unleash; limbs flailing, snot spraying like lava spouts. Apparently. the Coronavirus was a pox sent specifically to destroy her life, and we were the worst parents in human history. My prompt for clarification about whether she was referring specifically to homo sapiens or any human species was not warmly received.

These tantrums, punctuated by accusations of neglect and threats of self-harm, were both frightening and perplexing. Finally, she would flame out, like one of those extra-long fire place matches, her tall frame crumbling on the bed like ash.

After a few explosive weeks, we boiled the kettle and convened as a family on the patio. We talked and listened for two hours. The early parental refrain, “use your words honey,” never really loses utility.

In the calm embrace of chamomile, Phoebe found her words, channeling emotions into sentences. She felt disempowered, enraged and despairing. There seemed to be no end in sight for the shoddy on-line schooling, the loneliness of social isolation, cancelled plans, and way too much nuclear family.

These acute pressures are suspended on a continuous cortisol drip of worry over climate catastrophe and societal unraveling. Our children have a low-level sense of impending doom, one that I never had as an adolescent chasing balls on various courts. This spectre of Armageddon contributes to a wanton recklessness, often summed up with a flippant “What does it matter anyways? The world is going to end.”

We learned that COVID had stripped Phoebe of what she relies on to maintain a semblance of equanimity; the symbiosis of friendship. Love her as we do, we can’t provide that for her. She finds a solace and shared identity that can be only accessed through her contemporaries. I suppose, we all do.

After a lengthy dissertation on germ theory and social distancing - which, to her credit, Phoebe respectfully indulged - we devised a way for her to merge bubbles with her best friend after they had both quarantined for two weeks.

We created space. She found words as vessels for her feelings. From words, conversation sprung forth. And through conversation, we understood each other and found common ground. The simple is often so hard.

Dialogue is not just a healthy recipe for families.

In many ways, society is having a tantrum right now. We are screaming over each other. Black Lives Matter. All Lives Matter. Wear a mask. COVID is over. Defund the Police. Law & Order.

Indeed, now is the time to step boldly into our civic responsibilities and fight for our convictions, to shorten the arc of the moral universe. At the same time, liberal democracy is predicated on pluralism, a tolerance for a multiplicity of ideas. We need to cultivate public forums for the free, thoughtful exchange of ideas among individuals, such that moral virtue can cream to the top.

Brene Brown says, “People are hard to hate close up. Move in.”

It can be awkward and painful to engage directly with those who we see as adversaries, but these are the exchanges that will truly tip the balance for universal principles. And even when we are tempted to scream on Facebook, can we find the words and the grace to imagine that we are truly face to face? To both listen and make our best and most thoughtfully researched case?

Social media is without doubt an incredible organizing tool. But how can we communicate if we don’t actually talk to one another?

Consider the recent rulings by the Supreme Court in favor LGBTQ rights and the preservation of DACA. The Court can certainly be swayed by political loyalty and there are other significant judgments with which I do not agree. However, the assent for the majority in the Title VII case that protects gay and transgender people in the workplace was written by Neil Gorsuch, a conservative jurist appointed by this administration. This rare modern example of moral clarity taking primacy over political affiliation may not have been possible without the traditions of the Supreme Court, arguably one of the last vestiges of thorough and respectful debate. Indeed, the adjudication of the case itself turned on a nuanced interpretation of the words, “because of sex.”

The power of expansive conversation can bend people’s ideological predispositions.

The atomization and polarization of our society has been intensified by social media, the primary forum through which we “connect.” In a world largely devoid of religious affiliation and hazy national fealty, social media provides us with the opportunity to express our individual “political” identity. And it’s powerful - but dangerous. Our individual humanity is nuanced and complex. And social media, a strange non-consensual psychological experiment, radically tests our inter-relatedness. How can we properly express our identity or deeply held beliefs in 280 characters or less? Is it no wonder that we’re just hollering in an echo-chamber? Ask yourself, would you make that comment if that person was sitting across the table? Is social media expression predominantly private acts happening in public?

The posting of mawkish quote cards and viral memes (of which I am admittedly guilty) are often, at best, performative and, at worst, amplifications of unexcavated ideas. Science and media are imperfect institutions, but they are founded on traditions of rigor. And when they are systemically undermined, when there is no objective or even inter-subjective fact grounding us in a shared understanding of ‘reality,’ we all become easy prey to the hysteria of the moment. It becomes tantalizing to post wobbly notions of conspirituality. How many of us are guilty of posting a meme or slogan and becoming a vector for an idea that we don’t completely understand? I’ve surely done it.

Consider, for example, Defund the Police. On the surface, to some, it feels potentially radical and divisive. Without investigation, the slogan might suggest the complete abandonment of law enforcement, which some do support. But once this policy is thoroughly unpacked and discussed, there is so much common ground to share. Why should police be dealing with the mentally ill, managing domestic disputes or doling out parking tickets? Who could outright reject the reallocation of funding to address homelessness and drug addiction? Whatever your political persuasion, isn’t there a conversation here?

Further, if we took the time to learn the history of American policing and mass incarceration from militias to slave patrols, from the “professionalization” of police post-Prohibition to Nixon’s Southern strategy, from Rockefeller drug laws to the War on Drugs, from the Crime Bill to mandatory minimum sentences, from three strikes to the privatization of prisons; If we had a honest and meticulous discussion about policing and criminal justice, I cannot believe that 95% of people would not believe in wholesale reform.

This is not about gradualism, it is about a systemic change that requires words to both inspire and write law. This is not about compromising beliefs, it’s about committing to them so deeply that you are willing to bear them witness. This is not about arming yourself with vitriolic barbs, it is about fortifying yourself with unassailable rigor.

If we have any hope of actually communicating with one another, the words we use matter.

Call me a dreamer, but I haven’t given up on people’s intrinsic goodness and flexibility. I simply believe that enough of us need to find the patience and the words to have the brave thorny conversations.

The human species is unique in that we can cooperate at scale through the exchange of words. It is communication that has thrust us to the top of the food chain, and its dearth that can transmute us into warring locust swarms. Words matter so much right now.

Seismic upheaval often cultivates fertile ground for deep connection. The soulversation we had with Phoebe in April was the outgrowth of jarring emotional tectonics. What makes a family work also makes a society work. This past 4 months (perhaps 4 years) have been raw and challenging, with hope and despair pulling at both ends of a frayed lace. But don’t we all feel the portent of a generational moment?

Can we sit down around millions of tables, digital and wooden, to speak from the heart and listen with the soul? It’s a tall order. But the alternative looks like a nation of teenagers on a bender. What stands between us and the world our hearts know is possible may be thousands of knotty thoughtful conversations.

Finding Fatherhood

My father raised my brother and me through our teenage years as a single dad. It was not a course we chose, but one we maplessly navigated. Our relationship was hardly traditional, swinging between a pizza-for-breakfast kind of bromance and a deep loving co-dependency. As I stumbled into manhood and he, sometimes adolescently, rebuilt his life, we leaned into each other. We relished each other’s company and shared a passion for the cocktail of music, politics and parties. Oh … the parties.

Eventually, somewhat against our will, adulthood beckoned. Time has a father as well. I sailed off into the wide berth of life as if I was the first one to attempt to distill it into meaning. When we’re young, we don’t know that God, that celestial Father, is right where we are.

Last year, my father was diagnosed with colon cancer. In the aftermath of his surgery, he lost 35 pounds and became very weak. He remained astonishingly sanguine through the ordeal but his voice, normally round, plump with eloquence, was serrated and fragile. I would often steer the daily conversations I had with him toward the empirical; the test results, the probabilities of metastasis, alternatives to chemotherapy. In the prosaic and scientific, it was easier to keep a stiff upper lip. All the tropes of traditional masculinity applied: My family needed me to remain strong, confident, armed with facts. Clad in emotional armor, I fought to maintain order and stability. The truth was, I thought I might lose him. 

My middle daughter, Lolli, is an empath. She disappears for long periods of time by herself. One day, in the nadir of my dad’s travails, I slumped into her room, lay on the bed next to her where she was reading and I began to cry. Not a whimper. A full-bellied, snotty-nosed, pillow-drenching sob. She held me tightly for a long time, nursing me out of convulsions. Generously breaking the silence, she said finally, “I guess big boys do cry.”

Before I had kids, I had three theories on fatherhood. Now I have three kids and no theories. When you walk down the aisle of a bookstore, there are hundreds of tomes on fatherhood, which indicates there’s no one right way to do it, no playbook. We’re still finding it. 

But what I know, for me, is that to be a good father, I need a wholesale re-examination of the typical male archetype. 

It’s not that the norms of manhood; courage, discipline and pride are, in and of themselves, bad. It is the stereotypical depiction of these qualities that are obsolete and misguided.

We have lucidly witnessed, both individually and as a nation, how the penchant to be a “real” man, with its chest-thumping hubris and social dominance, leads outwardly to bullying, misogyny and homophobia and inwardly to stress and depression. As men, and particularly as fathers, we have a choice to eschew this toxicity that is passed along down generational lines.

Can we redirect pride from an obsession with one’s own excellence to a sense of contentment derived from another’s fulfillment of their own potential?

Can we consider courage as synonymous with vulnerability, for seldom do they exist without each other? I know Lolli finds me brave, not because I can suppress a tear but because I can shed one. 

Can we comprehend discipline as not solely the doling of punishment, but as a disciple-ship to our highest principles? Can we practice a familial form of restorative justice that focuses less on the punitive and more on addressing the harm caused?

If fathers and families can instantiate these practices in the home then will this not be reflected in the greater world? Would humanity not be more empathetic and compassionate?

When our family first relocated to Los Angeles, my daughters felt uprooted. This was particularly difficult for my eldest, Phoebe, who had cultivated meaningful friendships in Brooklyn. Right as she started sixth grade at her new school, there was an overnight science trip to the desert. The first afternoon, I got a call from the teacher. Phoebe was miserable and wanted to come home. I told her to give it some time. An hour later, the teacher called again and put Phoebe on the line. She was sobbing inconsolably. Of course, I felt for her. The notion of driving three hours there and back was daunting. I let her bawl until she was tired and then said, “If you want me to, I will come and get you right now. And I won’t make you feel guilty about it. Take twenty minutes and call back if you want me to come.” Needless to say, the phone never rang. I learned something about fatherhood; provide support and give choice. 

My girls are light years from perfect. They can be petty, spoiled and irreverent, mouthing their rendition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Our father, who art in the carport, hollowed be his wallet. Please give us our daily bread, preferably in tens, and forgive us our debts. Lead us not into your woo-woo meditations, but deliver us from soccer.”

Baldwin was right. They rarely listen to me, but they also rarely fail to imitate me.  I have never once asked them to do their homework, yet they are exemplary students, perhaps because they witness me working diligently on this computer and in the yard and have internalized diligence as a virtue.

What else are our sons and daughters modeling from our examples – good and bad?

I am not confident that most fathers truly realize the extent of their influence and the degree to which our children crave our admiration. Nor, I suspect, does society truly comprehend the devastating impact of tearing fathers from their families, an issue we must immediately confront. 

If we have any hope of advancing as a species – of ending war and eradicating racism - fathers must commit to an evolved paternity that shuns domineering patriarchy. We can hone our ability to share, cooperate, learn, follow and, very occasionally, ask for directions.

I send my father my weekly missive regularly for edits. Of course, what I really seek is his approval which he freely and proudly gives. He is doing well now. Just a bit embarrassed that a million people are reading about his colon. I suppose, it’s good for him. Fathers must be humble, too.

Privilege

It’s hot.

Schuyler, my three daughters and I walk east on DeLongpre to the protest.

Others are clamoring down the street, placards in hand, engaged in various forms of spirited horseplay. A sort of nervous energy pervades, like one that precedes performance. It is Hollywood after all.

I am tuned out, lost in thought, moated in the subjective experience of what it is to be me. My mind chatters on incessantly, as it has for weeks, commentating on my blundering internal investigation into where and how I am complicit in the oppression of a people who have so deeply shaped who I am.

I have never been blind to the obvious and insidious crimes of racism in America, nor my role as accomplice. But I assumed there was a fluidity to my identity because my formative years were so inextricably tied to Black musicians, writers, politicians and athletes. 

As I kid, I spent the better of ten thousand hours sweating buckets in my dad’s attic, learning the repertoire of Reverend Gary Davis and Mississippi John Hurt on the guitar. I had this tape recorder that played half speed. I would rewind over and over a hundred times to get it right. I burned through Waller, Ellington, Strayhorn, Ella, Miles, Canonball, Billie, Monk, Nina, Herbie, Benson. Transcribed Wes, which was nearly impossible. In my 20’s, like everyone else, I wanted to be like Mike, watching TBS all night to grok every nuance of his post moves, the little lean he did to create just enough space. Those who know, know. And my moral universe, shaped through the oratory of King and Obama and the prose of Angelou and Morrison. Passages I practiced in front of the mirror and turns of phrase that I yearn to echo here. 

Now I wonder if I can no longer authentically claim this part of myself. Is white hero worship of African Americans an inverted form of oppression? Or is it an expression of the best of humanity, one individual’s celebration of another’s brilliance?

What I do know is that the distance between who constitutes my cultural personhood and who constitutes the corporate boards I sit on and the student body of my children’s schools are as wide as the desert sky.

It’s hot. As we wind through the city, my moral inventory winds on, too. 

My loving grandparents, whose commitment to America and the promise of its dream, put family in front of self. It is they who assured my education, who gave generously to charity, who, themselves, emerged from oppression; yet what were the derogatory slurs they uttered under their breath?  

What implicit biases lurk inside me? What false narratives of history have sculpted my identity? 

Where the world shapes the self, what are the devious forces that imprint our character? And what patterns must be unwound so that the self can better shape the world? 

Sure, I am deeply committed to aligning my works and actions on this planet with my highest principles. I am generally kind, compassionate and generous. Yet, have I once honestly considered the benefits that I have accrued; that every loan application I’ve submitted has been approved, every insurance policy granted, that I haven’t been pulled over in thirty years?

I am sitting in the dissonance that you can be a good person and fully complicit in the structures and systems that have ravaged a people and denied them equal rights, protections and opportunities. 

Of course, this moment is not about me. And yet, it is about every single one of us.  Which is exactly why we are straddling the potential of true generational shift. Which way shall we march? 

As we approach the Hollywood precinct on Wilcox, police outposts pop up stirring agitation among the scattered groups of activists. I am shepherding my flock north across the street when I catch the eye of an African American cop. My heart lurches in my chest as it imagines being Black and blue in this moment, bruised by a competing fealty between race and colleague. Instinctively, I give him a short, deliberate salute, a feeble attempt at empathy. He nods, gently. 

We roll up to Vine from Sunset. The crowd thickens here from every angle as if the tributaries of the Nile, Yangtze, Amazon, Ganges and Mississippi are all emptying into one global ocean. 

Signs of every imaginable size and tenor are held proudly aloft like an Olympics ceremony. Koreans for Black Lives. Latinas for Black Lives. LGBTQIA for Black Lives. 

Even Spidermen for Black Lives. There’s a reason why it’s lovingly dubbed Hollyweird by its local denizens. The assortment of superheroes assimilates seamlessly as, of course, we are all wearing masks.

This twisted but hopeful moment in history has tightly crammed 20,000 people together in the midst of a viral pandemic, the size of the crowd directly proportional to the depth of the frustration. 

Multitudes are infilling behind us but the front is not moving, packing us ever more tightly, like a pumped and untapped keg (of Corona? not funny, I know). There’s a restless buzzing as the electrons of our outer shells begin to bond, unifying us. 

It’s hot. 

Finally, we’re moving. The drums begin beating. The crowd starts chanting, a full-throated call and response. No Justice. No Peace. No Justice. No Peace. Say his name. George Floyd. Say her name. Breonna Taylor. A mighty, rag-tag chorus of humanity. 

Left on Yucca. 

There’s not a single barricade yet a collective intelligence knows the way. Not a single uniform, yet everyone peaceful. People sweating and hungry are getting tossed free water and snacks, a pop-up gift economy based on need, not greed. There’s no one making money here. No VIP section. No side door. No laminate. 

Just a sea of humanity, singing effusively. And, in a moment, I am a wave swept up into the ocean deep. There is no me, only the world. No conscious thought, just being. No I, only we. 

If you are Christian, you might interpret this sort of experience as the oneness of God. If you are Buddhist, it might be a glance into nirvana, a transcendence of self and a sensation of emptiness. If you are Hindu, you could associate this state with Brahman, a connection to the eternal self of which our individual consciousness is a mere variation. My only association with this state is the rarest deep meditation where I feel outside of my own body. 

It is in these epiphanous moments that the utter absurdity of racism, or any form of separation, is revealed. In this unveiling of the illusory self, it is less that we are equal, which assumes our individuation, and more that we are one.

I don’t pretend to know God, but divine faith may be the recognition that we are all connected by a power greater than us. And I sense God is more interested in us loving each other than He is in us loving Him.

Of course, our human experience with its structural and systemic fuckery is light years away from this exalted state but to glimpse it is to know what is possible. 

Left on Ivar.

I am jolted back into the material world by a low flying drone. There’s a hapless couple with two small babies in a minivan, which they clearly parked without any knowledge of an impending march. Even they are dancing in their seats. 

We spill out on to Hollywood Boulevard which offers a wider berth and the intensity ratchets slightly down. There is an old Chrysler that has managed to wedge its way into the procession. A fabulously bejeweled young Black woman is perched on the door with her torso out the window tossing out granola bars. 

She spots little Micah, diminutive for her age, with her big Black Lives Matter poster held high. 

“How old are you sweetheart?” she hollers. 

“I’m 10!”

“What’s a 10-year old doing out here caring about Black lives?” Her tone is playful and kind. 

The edges of Micah’s mask turn up. She feels seen.

The woman smiles at me, a distillation of grace.

I guide my estrogen footprint down McCadden Place, a side street shortcut to where our car is stationed. We peel away from the throng, back into the story of separation, where we are again just strangers living among other strangers in some crooked external universe.

I corral my kids into my car to return to my house.

It’s hot. I crack the window and turn on the 1619 podcast and drive away.

What a privilege.